Third he claims that the media took a narrow survey and implied broad
implications for quality with high-level coverage. This is somewhat
true, and, well, what mainstream media does. And what Carr did with
his first claim. But the articles did link to the actual study.

Ross is fact checking Carr who is fact checking Wikipedia in what appears to be a drawn out mission to discredit it as a reference source. Okay Nick, we get it... you don't like Wikipedia, think it's flawed. Got it, move along.

Two things bothered me about the Carr post, first it would have been better in the discussion pages that are attached to every Wikipedia entry, and secondly, he didn't provide any links to the source material he is quoting.

It's interesting that Google has the support of the ACLU in their recent dispute with the DOJ about the subpeona for keywords and search results. I found this statement from the ACLU to be rather ironic:

"It's never been a principle of law that people can read your e-mail as long as they don’t know who you are," Jim Dempsey, CDT's policy director, told internetnews.com.

My more observant readers likely noticed an interesting link on my sidebar titled "Web 3.0 Wiki". The more curious of you clicked on that link only to be directed to a login screen, at least before today you did.

The original idea for this was born out of the simple question "what is web 2.0 for business users". I have not quite found the answer to that question but I have discovered that many of the consumer web2 services have great applicability behind the firewall. One of the more obvious examples is del.icio.us style tagging for intranet content, something you can get with the Tags.app plugin for Movable Type.

I have been tinkering with this for a couple of weeks and having tried several versions I've opted for a simple catalog approach. Please help me build this out by adding categories, providing company descriptions, and by adding new companies and projects. Two more sections I will be adding are actual production case studies and a blogroll focusing on the topic.

I think the answer's simple: VCs. VCs are great are crafting value
propositions for enterprise software and semiconductors. They
understand those industries very, very well.

But they
distinctly don't understand media and culture, and so they can't craft
value propositions (or build the right relationships, etc) for their
portfolio companies - and that's when they invest in the right
companies to begin with.

I was on a panel recently focused on web 2.0 in the enterprise and I made the comment, about 2/3 of the way through the panel, that it was interesting that all of these smart people were in the room expecting the software vendors to tell them how to implement web 2.0 when in fact the entire point of web 2.0 is to enable a high degree innovation and creativity in how it gets deployed. In other words, it's up to the enterprise in question to find the right mix of software and application in order to realize value.

There was a comment in the above blog post that caught my attention. Michael respectfully disagreed with my statement on this and to be quite honest I think his logic was accurate as to why I was wrong to say what I did. However, as Ross pointed out in the same panel, Socialtext "sells features, customers figure out the benefits" and that I very much agree with and this is why I think it's accurate to say that not only are venture capitalists caught in the chasm, but traditionally trained marketing people as well (full disclosure, since leaving Ventures I have been part of a traditional marketing organization). Therefore, under the filter of traditional marketing I was wrong to suggest what I said, but considering that traditional marketing may not be appropriate for web 2.0 at this stage I'm still going to say it.

With all of the noise being made about multiple core CPU's right now it is easy to forget that there is a massive development effort underway to bring developer tools to market so that the power of these new chips can be realized.

Octopiler is intended to become just such a compiler—one that can take
in a sequential program that's written to a unified memory model, and
output binaries that make efficient use of the massive, heterogeneous
system-on-a-chip that is the Cell Broadband Engine.

If we draw a line from where we are today with developer tools to where we need to be we can see an intersection point roughly in the space of fabric computing. We've been looking at fabric computing largely as a problem of writing to a cloud of servers when in fact it's far more likely that developers will be writing to a cloud of processor cores, something current generation tools don't handle very well.

There is likely another opportunity for startups in the area of debugging tools, which are currently not very easy to use in multicore processor implementations because of the prevalence of process abstaction. Another quality problem for multicore systems lies in concurrency, which by their very nature multicore processors are intended for.

Off the cuff I'd have to say that there is a strong sector play to be made in developer tools providing someone can get out of the gate with a tool that is targeted to developers working exclusively on new generation hardware platforms, whether they be PS3, Apple Core Duo, or Intel's boxes.

Interesting to see how Google can frustrate the best efforts of the best marketing organizations. Take a look at this screenshot, and witness the sponsored link for the Nike promotional site joinbode.com. Would you be interested in "exploring Bode's philosophy" after reading any of the returned search results? Whatdayathink Nike spent on Bode, $7, 10, 20 million?

Ellison described ORACLE's long-term strategy to develop a scalable religious architecture that will support all religions through emulation. A single core religion will be offered with a choice of interfaces according to the religion desired -- "One religion, a couple of different implementations," said Ellison.

Microsoft released some products for Microsoft Outlook last week in the form of source code packages available under their Shared Source license. Dynamic Snaps are plugins for Outlook that integrate with, among other things, Microsoft CRM.

The new programs are available on GotDotNet.com and enable users to
enter or retrieve data using Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0 and Microsoft
Dynamics CRM 3.0, within the familiar Office client environment.
Microsoft partners and other independent software vendors (ISVs) can
benefit by using the shared source code in the Snap-ins that have been
developed for Microsoft Office to enhance or customize the shipped
solutions or to use them as examples to build new composite
applications for their customers.

I think it's a little misleading for Microsoft to be calling these Snaps "products" though given that they are really unsupported source code modules that you have to implement and maintain yourself.

PS- the term "information workers" is so 1990's, and on top of all that largely an unfulfilled promise. Time to stop using it.

Feb 24, 2006

But student response to the ouster suggests another long-term outcome. Although the activists of esteryear may have found a temporary stronghold in the universities, a new generation of students has had its fill of radicalism. Sobered by the heavy financial burdens most of their families have to bear for
their schooling, they want an education solid enough to warrant the investment. Chastened by the fall-out of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, they are wary of human experiments that destabilize society even further. Alert to the war that is being waged against America, they feel responsible for its defense even when they may not agree with the policies of the current administration. If the students I have come to know at Harvard are at all representative, a new moral seriousness prevails on campus, one that has yet to affect the faculty members because it does not yet know how to marshal its powers.

I was talking with someone yesterday who is considering coming to work for SAP, he also has an offer from Google. One of the interesting comments he made was about how Google has a lot of people who are very good at creating new products but not accustomed to maturing them. In other words, look for a wave of hiring for product managers and engineers who are strong at incremental product planning, release planning, and upgrade development work. That is assuming of course that Google actually moves their popular services out of "beta".

The latest example of Google rolling out a new product and either underestimating demand or simply having a ham handed approach to maintaining scale on their beta is their Web Page Creator and the move to turn off new user registrations.

Well, here we go again. Google announces a new service and then within hours (about nine according to InsideGoogle) of annoucing it temporarily stops people from registering to use it.

The other really amazing example of poor product planning by Google is their Desktop v3 product and the issues around security that enterprise customers raised. I guess Google figured they were in the bad on this one so they did something surprising and just admitted that there was a security risk.

"We recognize that this is a big issue for enterprise. Yes, it's a
risk, and we understand that businesses may be concerned," said Andy
Ku, European marketing manager for Google.

But the question I had when I read this was more basic "what, someone didn't think about this before you developed the product?" Another example of Google being tone deaf to concerns their customers have. Google rather lamely says that security is an issue that companies themselves have to address. Yeah, they might want to chat with the guys up in Redmond to see how well that messaging works. SAP's network prevents anyone from downloading Google Desktop, so I guess we did take responsibility for maintaining strong security policies.

Feb 23, 2006

This is not technology related at all, but I did think back to the Google China episode a few weeks back when I read this op-ed in the Post today. What irritated me then was watching Google resist subpeonas from the DOJ for non-private information (keywords and URL's) on pornography one week, and not even a full week later saying that censoring speech in order to do business in China was okay by them.

As I have witnessed the Cartoon Jihad unfold across the globe I am reminded of the same level of hypocrisy in the major media outlets. In the same week the Mohammed cartoons blows up, Rolling Stone is running a cover with some rap star dressed up like Jesus at the Cruxification. How is it that the media holds itself to a high standard of sensitivity to Islam but not to Christianity?

Of course it's really not about Christianity vs. Islam at all, but something more profound and it's rooted in a pandering to one part of the world while expecting something more from another... not at all unlike Google acting as an agent of the Chinese government while at the same time being indifferent to the U.S. government.

While we may disagree among ourselves about whether and when the public
interest justifies the disclosure of classified wartime information,
our general agreement and understanding of the First Amendment and a
free press is informed by the fact -- not opinion but fact -- that
without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know
carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists and
publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There
should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public
interest.

Larry Barbetta was unable to come to terms with Oracle on a new contract and has left the company. Larry, as many of you know, was running Siebel's analytics group and was slotted to run the combined Oracle business unit for analytics. Chuck Phillips will make the internal announcement today about Larry leaving, if not already.

We have recently prepared a research report covering the window and door industry.

hmmm let's see, technology investments or the window and door industry... not just the window industry either, doors too.

I find it stunning that in this day and age companies can't do targeted segmentation for their marketing programs beyond the group "everyone". You would think that someone at this research firm could, you know, do a little research and figure out that SAP Ventures is a technology investor, like most VC's, and not likely interested in consolidation in the window and door industry. Marketing people have been talking about one-to-one marketing for at least a decade, maybe it really is a myth.

This is a week old but I wanted to link to it anyways because it's a very interesting analysis.

So JBoss triggered a phenomenon that they can’t seem to profit from. What to do? Well, one strategy might be to rely on the greater fool theory:
get someone to buy you before anyone’s the wiser that there isn’t a
business here. So far, BEA, Novell, HP, IBM and Oracle seem unwilling
to play that role. Doing this professional open source stuff is harder
than it initially looks!

Holy crap, Roger Moore is 78 YEARS OLD! That must mean Connery is like 187. BTW, I dislike all the Bond movies featuring Moore, they were too over-to-top with the gadgets and Moore comes across as a dork. Moonraker was a real laugher, but Octopussy wasn't that bad. I also liked the early Bond films when the opposition was S.P.E.C.T.R.E., as opposed simply the Soviets, and the Bond girls were always better in the Connery films as well. Don't have an opinion on the newest Bond, but if it were me writing the story I'd do what they did with Batman in the newest movie and make him a little dark and flawed. They gotta go back to the roots with Bond, enough with the political correctness and the flashy gadgetry. Favorite Bond movie of all would have to be Thunderball.

Everyday I get at least 5 or 6 "web buyer guides" from Ziff Davis in my inbox. I have never (ever) read one of them and it pisses me off because I get so much crap. So I did what any rational person would do, I scrolled to the bottom of the email and clicked on the "unsubscribe" link (which is another mystery because I never in a million years would actually subscribe to get any offers of any kind from anyone.)

You have been successfully removed from the Web Buyer's Guide White Paper Update newsletter.
This change will be reflected in the next 48 hours.

So first of all, why do they need 48 hours to update the change? Shouldn't it be like 48 seconds at most? BTW, I've done this every day for a week so the 48 hours bit is pure bullshit, they just don't unsubscribe you period.

The odd thing is that you can then go into their "subscribers center" where you think you are unsubscribing to their newsletters but the minute you put your email in and update you get subscribed to a bunch of other newsletters. You only discover this by going back into the subscriber center. Sneaky bastards.

I have another solution for unscribing, I just added ziffdavis.com and webbuyersguide.com to my spam filter.

Stefan Schulz works for Shai Agassi in what is loosely described as a special projects group. I've know Stefan for a long time and on one of his recent trips to Palo Alto he took the time to show me a system that his group had built for managing our employee alumni networks. Now what is interesting about this system is that it not intended to manage company alumni networks but rather our employee's university alumni networks.

At first I thought that it was interesting but I couldn't quite figure out what the value of it to SAP was, however then I had the ah-ah moment when I started looking at the profiles of the people in the system. There is a lot of detail about not only where you went to school and what you studied, but the areas of research that they worked on or have interest in.

I can't link to the system because it's internal only, but I will give you this screenshot of it to give you a sense of what they are doing. Amazingly, they already have 5,087 profiles accumulated, about 16% of our total employee population.

In another corner of our SAP Labs group is a team called "Design Services" and they are working on a bunch of really interesting projects, but one in particular caught my attention. It's called Harmony and it loosely described as a "Friendster or LinkedIn for enterprises". I don't know if this will ever be a product we offer but they are certainly intending to build it into our internal systems because one of the most significant challenges anyone in a large company faces is finding people who have worked on similar things as you, or have a background that is particularly relevant to a project or team.

On a related note, be sure to read this article about the work that SAP is doing in search technology.

I have said many times before that blogs, wikis, search, and social software are the new base platform for enterprise knowledge management. This isn't an earth shaking prediction, it is rather obvious given the failures of traditional KM solutions, and also reflect a continuation of the trend of consumer technology crossing over into the enterprise.

All of this is exciting for me because it signals attention being devoted to improving the way that people work together - collaborate - as opposed to simply improving the way a business process functions. The easy group forming attributes of blogs and wikis, along with the information retrieval capabilities of good search are force multiplied when you can rapidly bring together people in your company based on project requirements, experience, academic backgrounds, and peer recomendations.

I had a board of directors meeting last night for KIPP Bayview Academy, which for me is a fun board because it's smaller than most and has a nice social element to it (everyone is around the same age, no egos, nice people). In one of the crosstalk conversations a comment was made about Zappos.com and all of the women in the room immediately started talking about how great this site is.

What was interesting to observe was that they didn't talk about any of the features of the site, and selection was only briefly commented on; what really made this a great service was the customer service and the community that they have built around it, the "buyer's favorites" is an good example of this.

This reminded me that many technology-enabled companies forget that they are ultimately in the customer service business and if they don't get that right then everything else is academic and suboptimized.

BTW, I asked a random selection of women in my office today if they had heard of this site... not only did every one of them know it, they were all customers. I may look out-of-the-loop for not knowing this site, but we never invested in specialty retail and I'm not a frequent shoe shopper so you'll have to give me a little lattitude.

I was thinking that the title of Jeremy's post should be "how to make sure everyone reads your post" but it's certainly better the way it is now. On a serious note, it is interesting to watch how aggressively PR people have figured out blogs.

I was talking to Mike Masnick a couple of weeks ago and he had a cool new cell phone, told me that vendors are sending them to him in the hopes he'll write about them. Ross has the same thing happening to him. Hell, I'm just getting free books! My post last week was a thinly veiled attempt to get some free gear... maybe I should start writing about xbox360 games!

FreeCRM.com is an on-demand, web based CRM provider having a three year
old track record of delivering on-demand CRM and has over 25,000
customers.The unbelievable offer of $14.95 per month is for their
Professional Edition CRM.

Amazingly, they actually do have a free version as well that doesn't have outlook/blackberry sync and some additional features. It looks like they actually have some nice features on top of being free. Link via CRM Blog.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what the benefits of a pure SOA application framework are. While the technical benefits are important, of equal interest are the actual end-user business benefits for companies investing in this technology. Here's a short off-the-top-of-my-head start to kick off the discussion.

less disruptive updates and upgrades

new functional components developed quickly and with less risk than previous monolithic application releases. In other words adding a compliance function is less likely to break something somewhere else that is unrelated to the compliance function

greater third party ISV support which translates into comprehensive vertical app development

Andy Hayler has a post on criteria and methods for evaluating vendors and it reminded me of something we used to do (and may still do, I really don't know) for managing the process of evaluating customer requests for new features. The idea was simple, each customer has 100 votes (I don't remember what the exact formula was for determing the number of votes you had) they can use, if they have 100 features they would like they could put in 100 feature requests with 1 vote each, however if they had just 2 feature requests and one was critical and the other a nice-to-have they could put the critical request in with 90 votes and the other in with just 10. The point is that you had 100 votes that you could use in a weighted fashion.

An important thing about using a weighting system like this one is that the weights must add up to 100.The point here is that it forces you to make trade-offs: you can havean extra functional criteria, but you must reduce the existing weightsto make sure that the weights still add to 100. This gives thediscipline to stop everything being" essential".

This is a good methodology for evaluating vendors, products, or any purchase for that matter

This is a first, I received an email with a podcast pitch for a new investment opportunity:

Wireless ISP, OneVoice Communications, is well on its way to converting Jamaica into the World’s first completely wireless-based nation. Through its wireless Internet service and proprietary booths and kiosks, OneVoice Communications will be able to “bridge the gap” and provide Jamaica with island-wide Internet access that reaches everyone.

OneVoice Communications is currently seeking additional funding and has created the following podcast to explain why OneVoice Communications is a good investment.

It's too bad that Larry Summers got fired from Harvard, which is essentially what happened. I find the entire episode rather disturbing but couldn't quite put my finger on why until I read this:

Summers' intrinsic aptitude comment, like the Mohamed cartoons, exposes the conflict between free inquiry and multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, whether practiced by Islamic fundamentalists or radical feminists, holds as its highest value that no one should be permitted to hurt the feelings of privileged minorities.

and this:

The controversy over Summers' remarks shows that the multicultural left has a strong dislike of even considering ideas contrary to their world view.

What if Harvard decided to study the differences between men and women when it comes to math and science and comes to the conclusion that there are real differences that explain why women are less prone to enter the field of mathematics or basic sciences, will Summers get his job back and an apology?

This article in the Washington Post highlights an important aspect of this story that hasn't been told.

"It says that one group of faculty managed a coup d'etat not only against Summers but against the whole Harvard community," said Alan M. Dershowitz, longtime law professor at Harvard and a Summers ally. "He is widely supported among students and in the graduate schools."

According to a poll the Harvard Crimson did on the topic, Summers did enjoy strong support with only 19% of the students polled supporting the decision to resign. In the end, Harvard is the real loser here by allowing a single department to derail the significant transformation of Harvard as a whole.

Feb 21, 2006

Okay, I've come to the conclusion that the only way I can get my traffic fully moved over to my new site is to stop posting on the typepad site. On March 1st I will abandon this site for good, up until then I will continue to post on both sites and will post a nag every couple of days reminding you to come on over to www.jeffnolan.com.

uh-oh, looks like the SFdC issues may be more serious than they were leading everyone to believe.

Sources close to the company have confirmed to The Enterprise Software Observer that recent outage problems at Salesforce.com
are being caused by the on-demand company pushing its Oracle database
to its limits. This raises a number of questions about the company’s
future direction that investors are likely ask at tomorrow’s 5:00 pm
eastern quarterly earning conference call.

I'm a fan of business plans, although like every other rational and sane person I hate writing them. One of the things that I proposed and implemented for SAP Ventures was the notion of doing a comprehensive investment memorandum to support every new investment that was proposed. It was a large document, up to 40 pages, that chronicled every aspect of the deal being proposed, and in the end it very much reflected the intentions of a business plan, to lay out all of the moving parts of the business and understand them like a working model. Sure, I hated writing these damn documents as much as everyone else on the team, but the exercise of writing them sharpened my thinking greatly.

It was surprising to me to see how many variations of the basic business plan someone could create. Typically, this exercise gets little attention in the modern startup because 1) "we're different", 2) "there's still too many holes that we need to fill, or my favorite 3) "we didn't want to put the energy into writing something that really would not be used". Too bad, writing a solid business plan is an exercise that pays out far more than you put into it, here's a proposed template. Link via Anthony.

Feb 20, 2006

"I have tremendous
respect for veterans and I have sponsored many resolutions at the Board of
Supervisors supporting veterans' benefits. In fact, I put a $120 million
measure on the ballot in 2002 to rebuild San Francisco's War Memorial."

Supervisor Sandoval found himself in front of an audience outside of the 48 square miles that comprises San Francisco proper, in other words it was hostile territory... otherwise known as Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. Incredibly, he said that the U.S. should not have a military, said it not once but twice and again today in an op-ed in the SF Comical. I don't know what this guy is thinking but it really is scarry to think that SF has gone this far into the abyss.

Back to the quote of the day, and it's a real laugher. Sandoval takes pride in his respect for veterans, which I presume is intended to have us believe he respects the military in general. As evidence of this deep respect he reaches into his deep bag of legislative victories and points proudly to the, drumroll, ballot measure he sponsored to rebuild the War Memorial. Now I know that many of you reading this are not from the area and are asking yourself "but Jeff, what's the big deal, it's a war memorial right?". Allow me to give you the full name for the war memorial in question: San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. Yes, it is the opera house that Sandoval spent $120 million of SF taxpayer money to rebuild. There is a Veterans Building that is also part of the complex; The Herbst Theater, as well as the SF Arts Commission Gallery call that building home... I don't know if there are any actual veterans in the area but a large number of the panhandlers out front do have "veteran" on their signs.

Finally, a war memorial that most San Franciscans can support. As for me, I'd rather have the USS Iowa berthed here.

Tim Bray has an interesting post on PHP, which actually gets interesting in the updates (which he appends to from email because he doesn't have comments, pity). When SAP did the Zend investment a lot of time was spent on the technical due diligence. The slap on PHP has always been that it's a scripting language trying to be a "grown up" development language... you often hear this from older developers or, for lack of a better term, technology snobs.

Using Python as a contrast there are some distinct disadvantages that PHP has, like:

Python can be run outside of a web server as a separate process, PHP can't

indententation makes for easy-to-read code, and if you have ever looked at PHP code you know what I mean

PHP has a much larger core than Python

method chaining and multiple inheritance in Python, don't have that in PHP

lots of data types

differentiation between array types (lists and dictionaries) in Python

references are difficult in PHP

namespaces and modules in Python

The list goes on and in all fairness PHP has some distinct advantages as well, like the fact that it is very easy to get started with because it's more forgiving than competing languages (e.g. globals used to pass arguments, all variables are "set").

In the end, the strength of PHP for the investment decision came down to the fact that there were so many developers using it on so many websites. Community, it's increasingly coming down to the community and not the technology.

I think I still have my Troll, although he hasn't posted any displays of his cutting mastery of the English language lately. I hope he didn't run away... please come back Troll. Hopefully this site will lure him back if anything for the juvenile pleasure of vandalizing my blog. Via Scoble

Sweet! I have my own personal version of Megite. I've been using the general service for about a week, I'll try my personal version for a couple of days to see how it works. Thanks to Mathew Chen for setting me up.

Zoli posted an awesome summary of the TiE event I spoke at last week on Web2 in the enterprise. He was also kind enough to put up the notes on Writely for review before posting, but to be honest I just didn't have time on Friday to do it so I'm pleased that he posted it anyways. In reading it through I think it fairly reflects the evening, I will post any followup in the comments. Zoli, thanks for doing this.

This is a little late, but I wanted to post it anyways. Mike's 5th TechCrunch party on Friday night was a great time. With at least 400 people in attendance you just knew it was going to be a fun time. However, how many house parties have you gone to that have corporate sponsors, live product demos, podcasting, and a slew of really connected always on people?

The new dyanmics of product launch, company pr, and brand building are exactly what is embodied in Mike's parties. They are the unconference conference, blending a high degree of accessibility to the participants in a peer-to-peer environment with demonstrations of evolving technologies, and finally, an enjoyable social environment. What makes this possible is the easy group forming capabilities that blogs and wikis bring to bear. Make no mistake about it, in spite of it being a house party there is a lot of business going on.

Thanks to Mike and the extended circle of people who pulled this together, it was a great time.

Map Builder is a site I found that enables you to do your own Google or Yahoo! map mashups. While clearly not for the "average" web user, this is still a pretty low barrier capability that enables a wide spectrum of people to take advantage of something that would previously have either cost them a lot of money or required significantly deeper capabilities.